Sunday, September 30, 2007
UNITY IN DIVERSITY AND NEGATIVE SOCIAL CAPITAL
"Unity in Diversity", a mantra of John Paul II, was intended to be the slogan that would carry us into the 21st century as interreligious people cooperating with each other for the Church and the social good. He believed in it until he died, and his replacement seems to have been persuaded.
A study by Harvard University's Robert Putnam provides a different perspective. While immigration is the focus of his study, I would suggest that his conclusions would apply even more strongly to religious immigration, which is what we get with interreligious dialogue and even with ecumenism. If it doesn't work for communities, how is it supposed to work for the community of the Roman Catholic Church?
An article at "City Journal" describes Putnam's findings:
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
It sounds rather all too familiar. Our Church has been atomized by change and the importation of religious diversity. We are not responding well...apparently predictably according to Putnam's analysis.
